Welcome to our first quarterly update of 2026. I hope the year has started well for you and that you’ve had some space to reset after a busy winter season.
The first few months of the year at Creative Edinburgh have been full of practical conversations about how we continue to support Edinburgh’s creative community in both reactive and sustainable ways. As ever, our focus remains on strengthening conditions for freelance artists and creative practitioners, while staying closely connected to the wider systems that shape cultural life in the city and across Scotland.
A recurring theme this quarter has been how we define value in the creative sector, and how we ensure that evaluation, funding, and policy genuinely reflect lived experience and the realities of creative work of our growing community.
Culture in Community Settings
This quarter, I began work with a small cross-sector group on the development of a strategic approach to Culture in Community Settings for the Scottish Government.
At its heart, the work is asking a simple but important question: how do we better connect the many strong examples of community-based cultural activity already happening across Scotland, and help them realise their full potential?
Right now, there is a lot of excellent practice, but it is often fragmented and shaped by limited capacity, uneven resources, and a lack of joined-up strategy across sectors and places. This work aims to help address that gap by building a more coherent national approach that strengthens participation in culture as a foundation of Scotland’s wellbeing economy.
Over the coming months, the group will develop a framework for a more coordinated system that better supports communities, creative freelancers, and local organisations, and improves how funding, infrastructure, and decision-making work together across national and regional levels.
This is an important opportunity to rethink how culture is supported in everyday community life, not as isolated projects, but as a connected system.
